Many individuals are now connected with three separate telephone numbers. Each person can have a home telephone number, an office telephone number and a cellular or mobile telephone number. As shown in FIG. 1, the person would have an office telephone 20 located at his office, a home telephone 22 located at his home, and a mobile or cellular telephone 24, each of which has a different telephone number. In the traditional arrangement, the home telephone 22 and office telephone 20 would be connected to the PSTN, while the cellular telephone would connect to the cellular telephone network 35, which is tied to the PSTN 30. As shown in FIG. 1, the person might also have an office computer 10 and a home computer 12 that are both connected to the Internet 40.
If a telephone call is made to a person's home number while the person is at work, or vice versa, it can result in a missed call. Also, some people will switch a cellular telephone off while at work or at home. If a call is placed to the person's cellular telephone number while it is off, or if the cellular telephone is simply not immediately adjacent the person, it can also result in a missed call.
Attempts have been made to address this problem. The most common way is through a call forwarding service. In a call forwarding arrangement, a person could use the telephone connected to a home telephone number, and input a series of key strokes to cause all future calls to the home telephone number to be re-directed to that person's office telephone number. Likewise, the person could do the same thing with their cellular telephone. As a result, all calls to any of the three telephone numbers would be sent to the person's office number. But call forwarding is not a complete solution, and it can cause its own problems.
Often a person will forget that a call forwarding instruction has been issued. When this occurs, the person may be unaware that all calls to the person's home and cellular telephone numbers are being directed to the person's office telephone number. When this occurs, once the person has left work for the day he will not receive any calls, regardless of where those calls are initially directed. Anyone trying to reach the person at any of the three numbers would be connected to the person's office telephone, which will not be answered. And it might be impossible to contact the person again until there he is once again back in the office.
In addition, it is usually necessary to use a telephone connected to a particular number to cause future calls to be directed to another number, or to cancel a call forwarding instruction. So, for instance, if a person has left home and has arrived at work in his office, it would be too late to instruct that all future calls to the person's home number be re-directed to the person's office number. Such an instruction could only be issued from the person's home telephone.
Moreover, call forwarding services are typically toll services that involve the payment of additional fees in addition to normal monthly fees, or normal per minute charges. Such call forwarding charges can become particularly expensive on cellular telephones.
There are various existing computer and telephony systems that provide voice services to users. These voice services can be speech recognition and touchtone enabled. Examples of such services include voice mail, voice activated dialing, customer care services, and the provision of access to Internet content via telephone.
One common example of a system that provides voice services is an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. In prior art systems, a user would typically use a telephone to call in to a central computer system which provides voice services via an IVR system. The IVR system deployed on the central computer system would then launch voice services, for instance by playing an audio clip containing a menu of choices to the user via the telephone line connection. The user could then make a selection by speaking a response. The spoken response would be received at the central computer system via the telephone line connection, and the central computer system would interpret the spoken response using speech recognition techniques. Based on the user's response, the IVR system would then continue to perform application logic to take further action. The further action could involve playing another menu of choices to the user over the telephone line, obtaining and playing information to the user, connecting the user to a third party or a live operator, or any of a wide range of other actions.
The ability to provide voice services has been quite limited by the nature of the systems that provide such services. In the known systems that provide voice services using relatively complex speech recognition processing, the voice applications are performed on high end computing devices located at a central location. Voice Application processing requires a high end centralized computer system because these systems are provisioned to support many simultaneous users.
Because complex voice application processing must be provided using a high end computer system at a central location, and because users are almost never co-located with the high end computer system, a user is almost always connected to the central computer system via a telephone call. The call could be made using a typical telephone or cell phone over the PSTN, or the call might be placed via a VoIP-type (Skype, SIP) connection. Regardless, the user must establish a dedicated, persistent voice connection to the central computer system to access the voice services.
The prior art centralized voice services platforms, which depend on a telephony infrastructure for connection to users, are highly inflexible from a deployment standpoint. The configurations of hardware and software are all concentrated on a small number of high end servers. These configurations are technically complex and hard to monitor, manage, and change as business conditions dictate. Furthermore, the deployment of existing IVR system architectures, and the subsequent provisioning of users and voice applications to them, requires extensive configuration management that is often performed manually. Also, changes in the configuration or deployment of IVR services within extant IVR architectures often require a full or partial suspension of service during any reconfiguration or deployment effort.
Further, cost structures and provisioning algorithms that provision the capabilities of such a centralized voice services platform make it virtually impossible to ensure that a caller can always access the system when the system is under heavy usage. If the system were configured with such a large number of telephone line ports that all potential callers would always be connected to access contrasting types of voice services, with different and overlapping peak utilization hours, the cost of maintaining all the hardware and software elements would be prohibitive. Instead, such centralized voice services platforms are configured with a reasonable number of telephone ports that result in a cost-effective operating structure. The operator of the system must accept that callers may sometimes be refused access. Also, system users must accept that they will not receive an “always on” service.
Prior art centralized voice services platforms also tend to be “operator-centric.” In other words, multiple different service providers provide call-in voice services platforms, but each service provider usually maintains their own separate platform. If the user has called in to a first company's voice services platform, he would be unable to access the voice services of a second company's platform. In order to access the second company's voice services platform, the user must terminate his call to the first company, and then place a new call to the second company's platform. Thus, obtaining access to multiple different IVR systems offered by different companies is not convenient.
In addition to the above-described drawbacks of the current architecture, the shared nature of the servers in a centralized voice services platform limits the ability of the system to provide personalized voice applications to individual users. Similarly, the architecture of prior art IVR systems limit personalization even for groups of users. Because of these factors, the prior art systems have limitations on their ability to dynamically account for individual user preferences or dynamically personalize actual voice applications on the fly. This is so because it becomes very hard for a centralized system to correlate the user with their access devices and environment, to thereby optimize a voice application that is tuned specifically for an individual user. Further, most centralized systems simply lack user-specific data.
Prior art voice services platforms also had security issues. In many instances, it was difficult to verify the identity of a caller. If the voice services platform was configured to give the user confidential information, or the ability to transfer or spend money, security becomes an important consideration.
Typically, when a call is received at the voice services platform, the only information the voice services platform has about the call is a caller ID number. Unfortunately, the caller ID number can be falsified. Thus, even that small amount of information could not be used as a reliable means of identifying the caller. For these reasons, callers attempting to access sensitive information or services were usually asked to provide identifying data that could be compared to a database of security information. While this helps, it still does not guarantee that the caller is the intended user, since the identifying data could be provided by anybody.